Production As Analysis In Commercial Music Recordings

Since the 1960s, scholarship of popular music in the fields of musicology and music theory has blossomed (Kajanová 2013). The inclusion of the social sciences and humanities in music analysis has allowed for new methodologies in commercial music analysis. Although new methodologies have been developed around popular song analysis, they are notably absent in the field of music production (Blake 2012, 1). In this thesis, I will assert that music production is an under-explored facet of commercial music that offers abundant opportunities for analysis

To reverse engineer an entire nervous system

There are many theories of how behavior may be controlled by neurons. Testing and refining these theories would be greatly facilitated if we could correctly simulate an entire nervous system so we could replicate the brain dynamics in response to any stimuli or contexts. Besides, simulating a nervous system is in itself one of the big dreams in systems neuroscience. However, doing so requires us to identify how each neuron's output depends on its inputs, a process we call reverse engineering. Current efforts at this focus on the mammalian nervous system, but these brains are mind-bogglingly complex, allowing only recordings of tiny subsystems. Here we argue that the time is ripe for systems neuroscience to embark on a concerted effort to reverse engineer a smaller system and that Caenorhabditis elegans is the ideal candidate system as the established optophysiology techniques can capture and control each neuron's activity and scale to hundreds of thousands of experiments. Data across populations and behaviors can be combined because across individuals the nervous system is largely conserved in form and function. Modern machine-learning-based modeling should then enable a simulation of C. elegans' impressive breadth of brain states and behaviors. The ability to reverse engineer an entire nervous system will benefit the design of artificial intelligence systems and all of systems neuroscience, enabling fundamental insights as well as new approaches for investigations of progressively larger nervous systems.Comment: 23 pages, 2 figures, opinion pape

Lunar science below the surface - the MoonLITE Low Cost Penetrator Mission

Penetrators are low mass instrumented packages that can withstand high impact decelerations. They have been launched on two unsuccessful missions to Mars - Mars'96 and DS2, and were developed for the Lunar A mission to the moon which has now been cancelled. Although the benefit of penetrators in planetary in situ science still remains to be demonstrated successfully there is a strong case to be made for the concept. The MoonLITE consortium was formed in the UK with the aim of delivering penetrators to the Moon to do scientific measurements. This presentation outlines the scientific opportunities penetrators offer for lunar science. MoonLITE, a proposed lunar penetrator mission, and its candidate payload instruments are presented

An update on MoonLITE

MoonLITE is a proposed, UK-led lunar science mission comprising 4 scientific penetrators that will make in-situ measurements at widely separated locations on the Moon. They will form a global seismic network capable of investigating the interior of the Moon including the existence of a core, its size and nature such as whether it is liquid or not. Particular landing sites at 1 each pole will also allow determination of the existence of water and other volatiles, and astrobiological organics possibly deposited by impacting comets. The other two landing sites will include the far side which has also not yet seen a landing, and a landing near an Apollo site to allow correlation with previous results. Additionally, detection of lunar water resources and possible sites to avoid large seismic events potentially dangerous to lunar bases offer information very valuable to future human missions. We will present a brief overview of this mission and its current status, including results from the forthcoming full scale impact tests currently on-schedule for late May this year, and from the pre-trial survival modelling. The current status of the planned Phase-A analysis and NASA involvement, and associated parallel hardware development programme will also be presented, together with their potential impact on the future development programme. We will additionally discuss the current status of possible coordination with the recently NASA proposed lunar geophysical network, and with other proposed lunar missions